Read Online Healing Inc. by Deneice Tarbox - Free Book Online Page A

comfortable looking mattress and a clean toilet.  Pictures of a little blond girl, in most of which she sported a pigtail on either side of her head, embellished the walls making them a bit more bearable.  They showed her at various ages with her hamming it up for the camera.  He noticed that each picture had a note scribbled in childlike writing underneath it. 
     
    As the girl matured in the pictures, so did her writing skills.  In the one Marcus thought to be the last in the series she appeared to be about twelve or thirteen years of age.  She wore a smile that didn’t quite reach her pretty brown eyes and her demeanor was much more somber than in all the others.  Her hair hung past her shoulders flat, stringy and lifeless.  He couldn’t help but feel her sadness. 
     
    Noticing the look on his visitor’s face, Thomas followed his gaze to the picture.  “Pretty, ain’t she?”  He was smiling at the picture.  Just as quickly as it came the smile faded, replaced by a look on indifference.  “She ain’t hurt no more… She’s dead,” he continued speaking in his unusual dialect.  He turned from the picture back to face Marcus, making eye contact with him.  “She don kilt herself shortly after that picture was taken.  She be sixteen went it happen.”  With that said, he returned to the consumption of his meal.
     
    Marcus stood watching him, unable to fully understand why Thomas was so nonchalant about his daughter’s death.  He decided that he didn’t have time to find out.  Ratcliff was scheduled to be executed in two hours and he had wasted enough time already.  He needed to find out why the man had summoned him there. 
     
    “I don’t want to keep you from your meal, Mr. Ratcliff, but why did you request to see me?”
     
    Popping the last of his steak in his mouth, he repositioned himself in his comfy chair ready to give Marcus his full attention.  “You had a brotha, older than you… Randy Cole, right?”
     
    “I did.”  Eighteen years later, the sadness of the loss of his brother still haunted him.
     
    “Ya brotha…” he faltered, “ya brotha was my first victim.”  He hung his head, unable to deal with the shock then pain that came to the other man’s eyes.  “Ya see, he and my Kathy been going together.  She hid it from me…not knowing how I’d re-act.  I guess that’s my fault.  I never says anything good about those not like us.  Well, she come up with child she scared, she know’t the baby might be colored.  She tole me he raped ha.”  His eyes grew distant with the horrors of years passed.  “I couldn’t take it!  The thoughta some nigger!  Some black bastard touched my lil girl in that way!”  He spoke the words as though they were acid in his mouth. 
     
    “I follow’t him one day afta he leave work.  First chance I get, I hit him in the head with a pipe iron an shove em in my car.  Drove him to where I hunt an waited til he woke up.  At first, I din’t know what to do with him.  Then he starts screaming, I had ta shut him up.  Thas when I cut his throat.  He didn’t die directly.  He was alive when I cut his thing off.” 
     
    He chanced a quick look at the other man who was now collapsed against the opposite wall from his cell.  He was bent over with his hands on his knees, all the color gone from his face.  Thomas thought the man was going to be sick but he had to finish telling him.
     
    “Something came alive in me afta that.  You know, I din’t stop with him.  One day my lil girl tol me she lied, she lied about the whole thing.  She says she love em.  She was the first to find out what I done.  Looking in ha eyes that day was tha worst day o my life!”  Emotion captured his voice, silencing him temporarily.  “I turn myself in after that.  Couldn’t bring myself to confess to ya brotha’s murder cause that one brought the most shame.  He haunts me most of all.  Kathy kilt herself… I hope she not in pain